"Her group of friends were verbally abusing the officers, saying it was police brutality, but it totally wasn't. She tried to hit one of the police officers while they were talking to her."

Ms Brodrick suspected the woman was already high.

Businesses in the area have collected more than 1000 signatures in a bid to close U njoY.

Grey Street Kitchen head chef Sara Wright said almost everyone had a story to tell about U njoY's clientele.

She said she had seen men performing sex acts and public defecation.

The mounting problems have forced Todd Anderson to move his business out Hamilton East.

Mr Anderson owns Sound and Picture on the corner of Cook St and Grey St and in a letter to his landlord, Matt Cables, explained why he's decided to move.

"Over the last five months we have been struggling with the local street problems of which you may have heard in the news, even just today we had gangs, police and dogs fighting on the street," Mr Anderson said in the letter.

"We can't continue here and have found a new shop in town, this is both to improve our business profile and better security for us. We have called 111 four times in the last five months because we were worried for our own safety and locked the shop."

Mr Cables, director of Wicked Witch which owns two units on the corner site, confirmed he had a tenant cancel a lease because of the impact of the puff shop. Both he and his wife had noticed the problem getting worse in recent times.

"My wife has been stopped and asked for money, all the time. She feels like she's being sized up for robbery and she walks to and from kindy to collect my kids and doesn't feel safe obviously going through the area," he said.

"From a commercial sense we've got a shop that we're losing tenants from because of the problem . . . and then we [are] going to have the issue of re-leasing a property in an area that's getting bad publicity at the moment."

He said a council decision to ban puff shops from Hamilton East wouldn't solve the problem.

"We're kind of losing the problem, but it's just shifting it from one area to another isn't it?"

Submissions on a draft psychoactive substances policy opened yesterday. Council is due to ratify the policy in March.